| I always say that everything in gardening can be done slow and cheap or quickly if you don't mind paying. VGSD does things the quick way, more or less by necessity. Giving people insta-gardens is impossible if step one is telling them to compost for a year and let their organic waste break down. I got lost on my way to the house but once I found the street, it was obvious which house was getting the garden: the one with a huge pile of compost in the driveway.
Step one, which I did not take pictures of, involved building the raised beds. Each bed consisted of a wooden frame with a wire mesh bottom to keep any digging critters out.
Step two was laying down newspaper and, on top of it, cardboard over a patch of lawn. We set all of the cardboard with any print face down. Then we hosed it down so it was nice and wet and ready to break down. And we laid the raised bed frames on top of them.
Raised beds
With that taken care of, we each grabbed a bunch of branches, broke them into little pieces and tossed them on the bottom. These are carbon rich "browns" in compost lingo and they will slowly break down and add fertility to the soil.
Raised bed frame with the bottom covered with twigs
While doing this, Laila (owner of the new garden) and I took my clippers to prune her bushes so we could add the pruned branches to the bottom of the beds.
Lovely Laila with her pruned branches
Some folks added "greens" to the bottom of the beds too. Those are nitrogen-rich organic materials that break down quickly. Mostly that means food scraps - anything that would get moldy if you left it sitting out in your kitchen, more or less. You don't want to add too much of these to the beds because they get hot as they break down, and you don't want to burn the plants.
With the browns and greens added, it was time to add the soil. I took a long turn shoveling the soil into wheelbarrows. Hey, it's a free workout! Who needs a gym membership?
Scooping up the soil for the bed
Adding the soil!
The bed, full of soil
As some folks dumped the wheelbarrows of soil into the beds, others raked the soil flat across the bed. We filled the beds until they were nearly overflowing because the soil is light and airy now and it will soon settle to below the top of the wooden frames. Once the beds were full, we watered them.
We had some extra soil left so we spread it along the back of the fence in Laila's yard to plant sunflowers there. I added some calendula and borage seeds as well, but I really think Laila oughta plant some strawberries there...
Meanwhile, others built Laila's new compost pile:
While I'm not crazy about the use of plastic here, the nice feature of it is that the plastic frame has holes in it to allow oxygen into the pile on all sides. They arranged three sides of the bin and attached them to one another with plastic zip ties. Once that was done, as you can see in the photo above, we drove 2 metal stakes into the ground and attached the plastic frame to them with zip ties to stabilize the whole bin.
UPDATE: I found out that the plastic used here is reused from an electronics company that would otherwise throw it away.
Last, we added the door in the front. Again we attached it with zip ties, but this time we only did so on one side and we left the other side open. Bob, the founder of VGSD, advised Laila to use a rope to tie the door closed so that she can easily open it when it's time to turn the compost. And another man, Richard, explained the basics of composting to Laila. I gave her my own piece of advice: If your compost stinks, you need more carbon and oxygen, which you can efficiently add by tossing in some twigs and branches and then turning the compost pile. (I do a lot of gardening via trial and error. Stinky putrifying compost is one of my most common errors.)
The completed compost bin
As we built the compost, others put in stakes for the tomatoes. They used bamboo, tied with string.
Stakes for the tomatoes
And now, the finishing touch: Plants!
Zucchini, peppers, and okra, along with an oregano I brought for Laila
Eggplant and tomatoes
Dirty hands!
And, three hours after we started, Laila had a garden!
Laila's garden
Woo hoo! We did it!
The day was fun and very inspiring. And no one inspired me more than Laila, because now that all of the initial work is done, she's the one who has to keep it up and then cook and eat the veggies. She was enthusiastic and said there are no veggies she won't eat. The garden will help her as a single mother as food costs go up. And the plants we gave her include quite a few high value crops like heirloom tomatoes and peppers. You can easily spend $4/lb on those tomatoes or $6/lb on peppers if you get them organic from a local farm around here. Zucchini, while inexpensive, is also incredibly productive. Give Laila's neighbors a few months and they'll learn to lock their doors to keep Laila from giving them her extra zucchinis. |
